


An incomplete manuscript

by satelliteinasupernova



Category: Riverdale (TV 2017)
Genre: F/M, Introspection, ace spectrum jughead jones, if you are feeling that season one nostalgia here you go, lots of introspection
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-07
Updated: 2018-04-07
Packaged: 2019-04-17 13:24:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,278
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14189886
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/satelliteinasupernova/pseuds/satelliteinasupernova
Summary: “Alright, you promised,” Betty said, bouncing her hands against the linoleum table. Whether intentional or not, it created the effect of a drum roll. “Today’s the day. Let me see it.”Jughead was seated across from her at his usual table at Pop’s. He had eaten through two hamburgers, a full order of chili fries and a milkshake while he waited for her to join him after cheerleading practice. He was already eyeing the extra fries that were next to Betty. Nerves made his nearly insatiable hunger much worse.“It’s just the first few chapters,” Jughead muttered, but he still dutifully pulled out the copy that he had printed out at the school library that morning.





	An incomplete manuscript

**Author's Note:**

> The art for this one-shot can be viewed at satelliteinasupernova.tumblr.com/post/172674579499
> 
> Comments are appreciated! <3

“Alright, you promised,” Betty said, bouncing her hands against the linoleum table. Whether intentional or not, it created the effect of a drum roll. “Today’s the day. Let me see it.”

Jughead was seated across from her at his usual table at Pop’s. He had eaten through two hamburgers, a full order of chili fries and a milkshake while he waited for her to join him after cheerleading practice. He was already eyeing the extra fries that were next to Betty. Nerves made his nearly insatiable hunger much worse.

“It’s just the first few chapters,” Jughead muttered, but he still dutifully pulled out the copy that he had printed out at the school library that morning.

Betty was practically bouncing in her chair with anticipation, but her excitement only fed into his own anxiety about the whole thing. When they had first talked about it, he had been almost eager, himself. No one had ever taken a real interest in his writing before. Most people treated writing as a quirky habit that he had and didn’t express much interest in what he produced outside of the subject matter. So, the fact that Betty was showing an interest in his own personal project had hit him with excited nerves.

Then he had woken up that morning with the dawning thought that maybe he hadn’t thought it through enough. How do you respond to someone writing about the drama encapsulating your own life?

Even before that summer, Jughead had always looked for little cracks in the perfect veneer of Riverdale. On the outside, Riverdale had a sunny innocence that felt detached from darkness or crime. As he got older, Jughead started to think better of the reverence he had always had for his hometown. Every morning, he would walk from the Southside to his Northside school. It seemed like everything was different in the Northside, but he was sure that the dirt that was so apparent in the South was just being pushed under the rug in the North.

Then Jason Blossom had disappeared, the cracks he had always known were there had started to buckle under and the new opening revealed a flood of grime hidden under Riverdale’s shiny image. Researching and depicting everything as it happened had felt like a calling to Jughead. Betty, on the other hand, though blooming intrepid reporter she was, had been pulled in by more than just her curiosity. It had become essential because of her love of her family. She needed questions answered about her sister and her parents. As more was coming to light, it seemed like her own stake in the matter was more central to the problems in Riverdale than they had originally realized. He hadn’t avoided depicting any detail on that front.

Even before she had become integral to the mystery of Riverdale, he had written a lot about Betty. Not limited to just her family drama, but also her heartbreak with Archie, her rocky first steps of friendship with Veronica. To him it made sense. When you wrote about Riverdale, Betty, Archie and Veronica were the center. They were the characters you wanted to follow while a grisly murder unraveled.

 

Betty slid the printed manuscript toward her, and with a pointed grin at him, pulled out a red pen.

He groaned, “Really, Betts?”

“Just light editing. You shouldn’t waste having a second pair of eyes, Jug.” With that she turned toward the first page, focusing on his work.

For a few moments, Jughead just watched her as she read. She didn’t reveal anything in her expression, but her eyes were sharp. He tried to figure out which part she was at by following her gaze. As she reached the section where he introduced her, he squirmed and did his best to hide his insecurity by stuffing a fry into his mouth.

He regretted not telling her ahead of time how much she actually factored in as a subject. How long he had spent detailing her character. If anything, this new project had revealed to him how much he enjoyed writing about her.

 

Jughead didn’t have many people that he felt at ease around. Betty’s status as one of a small selection had been gradual, over an extended period of sharing a best friend. If anyone had asked him before eighth grade, he would have said they weren’t friends. They were two people who liked to hang out with the same person.

Things had gotten awkward in middle school when Archie started dating. It rocked their established friendship balance more than Jughead had expected. He had always assumed that Archie and Betty would be dating as soon as they were old enough to care about that kind of thing. The adults around them made comments about how cute a couple they were all the time. Because of that, he hadn’t thought Archie dating would really change much.

It turned out when Archie did start really noticing girls, it wasn’t Betty. It was girls that Jughead had no interest in hanging out with, and involved Archie befriending people Jughead had never even spoken to. Jocks, the so called popular kids. Soon, casual hangouts between him, Archie and Betty weren’t nearly as common. Betty hadn’t been taking well to Archie’s new foray into dating either and had started to reach out to other friends, expanding her own social group.

No longer the focus of his best friend, he felt awkward when he was around him and abandoned when he wasn’t.  Their friendship had always worked because of just how easy it was to be Archie’s friend. With Archie distracted and excited about the changes in his life, it felt like that dynamic was crumbling.

Suddenly finding himself with a lot of free time, that was when Jughead really took to writing. He would pull up his newly gifted, used laptop during lunch break and sit at the one forgotten lunch table next to the air conditioning unit outside the school. The mechanical humming would cancel out all of the chatter from the rest of the students around the corner.

His lunch became a solitary thing, until Betty came and found him.

“This is where you’ve been sitting? I’ve been trying to figure out where you’ve been eating for weeks.” She set her food tray down and slid onto the opposite wooden bench.

His eyebrows raised up, “I didn’t think you were in desperate need of my company, Betty.”

She had looked at him for a long moment after that, while she bit into an apple. “We are friends, Juggie,” she said simply.

Jughead couldn’t find a response right away. Maybe it was because he had started to doubt that he was anyone’s friend that it hit him so fiercely. He was overwhelmed by a feeling bubbling up inside him. It made his head feel hollow, and his fingers numb except for a smattering of pin pricks all along his arms. He focused intently on the screen in front of him, because, frustratingly, he could feel his eyes watering.

“I just wanted to find somewhere quiet to sit for a change,” he tried to say convincingly.

Betty noted the air conditioning unit with a look, but didn’t question it. Instead she said, “Archie thinks you’re mad at him.”

“I’m not mad at him,” Jughead said, maybe too quickly.

“I know. But if you’re wondering why things have been kind of difficult lately. That’s why.” Jughead hadn't thought of the situation as difficult, he was just pretty sure this was just how things were going to be from now on. Betty moved her tray out of the way and leaned forward. “Archie hasn’t stopped being our friend, you know. We might just… have to be a little more proactive.”

It felt like Betty was seeing right through him, but he had watched how her eyes had been red-rimmed for days after Archie told them he had a girlfriend. Every time Archie’s new friends joined them, Betty had given Jughead a suffering look. As he looked at her now, smiling sympathetically at him, he realized that instead of avoiding it like he had, she had tried to adjust.

He also realized that he had been completely unfair in calling Archie his only friend.

Betty took a deep breath, and shook her shoulders, dispelling the sudden heavy atmosphere, “And anyway, even if Archie isn’t around, you should sit with me and Kevin. It doesn’t feel right when you aren’t there.” She glanced down at his laptop, “Unless, you don’t want company?”

At some point the weird pin prick feeling had adjusted into a fluttering that he couldn't explain. He reached across the table for a pickle that had fallen from her sandwich, “Eat your lunch, Betts, or I’ll eat it for you.”

 

Jughead was broken from his thoughts by the motion of Betty’s pen, making a series of circles on the paper. She turned up to meet his eyes with an amused smile, but simply said, “Just making notes.”

She didn’t say anything about how he had compared her to the women of some of his favorite films, or how he considered her the warm-hearted center of a grim conspiracy.

Granted, Jughead had never shied away from complimenting Betty. It was easy to do, and hardly embarrassing to say when it was about things she and everyone in Riverdale already knew.  Betty’s family didn’t have a great track record, but even since they were kids she had been fair, considerate, and had a quick, but warm sense of humor. She was the most likely to laugh when he made a casual reference, and easily remembered whatever thing he might have ranted about three weeks ago. She was like that with anyone she considered a friend, but it was something important to him. Maybe especially important to him more than anyone.

He didn’t know how much Betty would read between the lines in how he wrote about her. Maybe it seemed normal, or it was just his dramatic flair. At least part of it was absolutely for effect, but even now as he studied the change in her expressions while she read, he knew that wasn’t the only reason.

None of this was new. It had been true even before that day at the middle school lunch table, if he was being honest with himself, but he had never willingly acknowledged it. Betty liked Archie, still liked Archie, even when his attentions were elsewhere. One day Archie would stop being oblivious to all of it, and maybe the three of them would be best friends like the plan had always been. How else Jughead felt on the matter, well, there was no point in focusing on it.

Things had changed, now. Betty had told Archie her feelings and he hadn’t been hit over the head with any sudden realization of his romantic love for her. And, again, Betty had adjusted. She had taken up a cause in awakening the dormant Blue and Gold, had pulled him into a more organized level of sleuthing, and was apparently open to dates with nice football players who weren’t Archie.

Jughead had spent the last few weeks dealing with an entire spectrum of feelings he wasn’t used to. Betty’s feelings for Archie, and the assumption of an endgame between them had functioned as a safety net for Jughead’s own. It wasn’t that he ignored it. Sometimes when Betty would lean next to him, or smile at him a certain way, he would be so overwhelmed that it felt like his heart had just shuttered deep within his chest. At the end of the day, he could still shrug that off, because nothing would come of it.

The safety net was gone now.

Their relationship hadn’t changed significantly since Betty’s rejection, but there was something subtle at the core that was different. Every joke she laughed at, every smile she made at him from over someone else’s shoulder, every text she sent, no matter how innocuous, it made him feel like he was on a precipice, the wind carrying up hitting his face. His feet were at the edge, anticipating a free fall.

There was no Archie there to stop him anymore, everything he felt and every thought he had tucked away was now always at the tip of his tongue. It felt like it was embedded in the fabric in everything he wrote about her, and whether it would be obvious to anyone else reading it, he didn’t know.

Betty was several pages in before she paused and put the papers down. She looked up at him with a thoughtful expression, as though assessing him. Immediately he felt his heart fall to the pit of his stomach.

“You don’t really write about yourself, Jug.”

It took him a moment to stop panicking before he really processed what she had said.

“Well, yeah. I’m writing about this new Great Mystery of Riverdale, the fallout from Jason Blossom’s death. I’m just the observer, it’s not supposed to be about my life.”

In fact, Jughead had actively spent the last few months hiding his life from everyone. His mom had left town with Jellybean, and everything that was already on cracked hinges in his life had officially started to break. He had done his best to find a solution when he couldn’t handle living with his dad anymore. It was his problem, and one he could deal with. He didn’t need it affecting the way people treated him, or judged him. His friendship with Archie hadn’t made it through the summer even without Archie taking on his baggage, and Betty hadn’t needed to come home from her internship to deal with something he was handling just fine on his own. If it wasn’t something he wanted to talk to friends about, why put it in this project?

Most of all, it wasn’t something that would be interesting to detail in great length in an investigative novel. Overtaking the plot with the household drama that had affected his day to day life.

She leaned her face against her hand, looking down at the manuscript thoughtfully. “No, I understand that. That’s not really what I mean…” She took another moment to think, “I don’t know. You’ve written a lot about the other people you know, Archie, me, Veronica, and Cheryl, too. I like it. I liked getting to see us all from your point of view, but it’s almost like you’ve written it as though you aren’t present.”

“What do you mean?” Jughead asked, glancing down to watch as her fingers fiddled with the edge of the paper.

“Hm, well. Okay,” she said now with a decisive look. She put the first few pages aside, searching for a specific section. “You've talked about all of us, about me and V and our investigation of the football team, and why it mattered to us. Then, when you're talking about the drive in, you explained what it meant for it to shut down, what it meant for this town, but why didn't you include how hard you tried to keep it from closing?”

The drive in was complicated, in part because it had briefly been his makeshift home, he began to try to explain, but she shook her head and continued.

“It's in the little things, in the way you talk about us. Even when you’re just describing the four of us all hanging out at Pop's. You make it sound like it's just the rest of us there, and you’re outside of it, watching. So, while I was reading this it just felt like… maybe you don’t realize how much impact you have, Juggie.” She looked up so that her eyes met his. Her eyes were so clear, he thought he could see every minute detail of her irises.

Jughead’s heart was beating heavily in his chest. He forced a smirk, hoping it seemed casual, “Maybe I just didn’t want to come across as one of those jackasses who uses their novel to make themselves seem important.”

Betty humored him with a laugh. “I think if we compared notes between your novel and my diary, the same pieces of the case would seem pretty different.”

Jughead’s smirk dropped from his face, “Wait.” His eyebrows drew together, “Are you telling me you write about me in your diary, Betts?”

Betty took in his expression and laughed, “You’re a part of my daily life, aren’t you? It’s not like you’re the only one that wants to write all of this down. I may not be writing mine for an audience, but it helps me think all this stuff through. To try to make it all less of a mess in my head.”

When Jughead still didn’t say anything, she continued, a giggle in her voice, “I promise I’m not saying anything bad about you, except when you’re being a jerk and you deserve it.”

Jughead smiled at her in response, but he was still reeling. He could follow the logic. He was a part of Betty’s life, and if Betty wrote about her life, he would therefore be a part of that. That didn’t explain why suddenly his entire body felt like it was filled with bubbles under his skin, popping into sparks all the way down to his toes. Maybe he thought that Betty just stopped thinking about him when she focused on the important things of her day to day. He was just a backdrop of her hectic, now slightly dramatic life.

“Anyway, it's not something you need to change or anything, I just wanted to point it out,” Betty said, turning back to the papers, “but if you aren’t completely opposed to critiques, I do think I can help with some of the structuring.”

“Of course.” he said resigned, with a sarcastic smile. She returned it with a genuine one and dipped her head down as she started writing notes in the margins.

Jughead was suddenly hit with an intense, physical desire to run his hand along the curve of her neck, to run his thumb along the side of her chin. It was momentarily overpowering, a central thought driving out everything else in his mind. What followed it was the feeling of the floor being pulled out from under him. That brief, weightless feeling before an inevitable fall.

It was such a rush of sensations that he was almost surprised that he was still sitting in the booth when he finally managed to take a full breath.

It was like the final ring of a bell as it counted down to midnight. He waited patiently while Betty sat across from him, her demeanor serious as she added notes, but he knew that he could only put it off for so long. He’d lost his footing, and there wasn’t much time left before the free fall.

In the end, when he had climbed up the ladder to Betty's bedroom, knowing that time was up, it was time for him to act, he was almost ready for the fall. He tried to keep his posture, his limbs from revealing his nerves. When words failed him, he reached out for her, closing the distance between them with a kiss, feeling that rush of panic as he jumped, letting go of every deflecting comment, every sardonic expression he had previously hidden behind.

When Betty leaned in to kiss him back, he could suddenly feel the ground again. She had caught him in midair. When he pulled away to look at her, there was a smile on her face, too soft and warm for him to ever forget.

 


End file.
